21st May 2009 Archive

A hard drive containing more than 1 terabyte of sensitive data from the Clinton administration, including the personal information of White House staff and visitors, is missing from the US National Archives.

A certification scheme that threatened to ban many software and hardware products from China has been curtailed. The scheme, which holds IT vendors to controversial national standards, will be limited to public procurement only, a government agency has said.

Fancy an affordable wireless iPod system that can grow to suit your needs or just looking for a way to avoid hardwiring speakers in the your home? Certainly, wireless sound systems take some beating in terms of convenience but, typically, at a cost. Addressing both portability and price, the new IntelliTouch Eos offers multizone audio may prove to be a sound investment.

RealNetworks is filing an anti-trust action against the major US studios. It says it has a license to use CSS decryption which it obtained legally, and therefore its RealDVD copying software is not only legal, but attempts by the studios to block it amount to anti-trust. It will be interesting to see if a court agrees.

It's been a good day for mainframe tape users. They can store data on cheaper open systems virtual tape libraries (VTLs) thanks to Bus-Tech's MDL-100V product, and Sun has simultaneously enhanced its mainframe VTL and tape products.

Google's all-seeing Street View is attempting to convince German authorities that it should be allowed to retain "partially censored images" which Hamburg and 15 other states want purged from the search monolith's databases.

That embarrassing party shot of you and that hot dog may still come back to haunt you - photos posted on social networking websites can often be easily viewed even after users attempt to delete them, according to a study by security researchers at the University of Cambridge.

Two months after Skype announced a beta of its SIP gateway, the company's general manager has called on PBX manufacturers to get compatible, despite half a decade of refusing to play nicely with anyone.

Defence lawyers in the Sarah Palin webmail account hack case intend to claim the Alaskan governor's emails were a matter of public record and therefore enjoyed no expectation of privacy. The novel legal tactic is designed to reduce the seriousness of the charges against their client, David Kernell.

In 2003, Cisco selected six key emerging markets on which to focus to drive growth and new revenue streams. Recently, it has increased that number to a huge 30, all unified by the common theme that they are driven by the explosion of data traffic over wired and wireless IP networks.

Pondering what mobile phone will survive the toughest environments? Look no further than the House of Commons, where Tom Watson of the Cabinet Office yesterday gave a list of exactly which mobile phones have paid the ultimate price in Gordon Brown's battle against the world, the recession and everything.

An independent IT retailer group has slammed the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and accused it of “ignorance” over what the outfit sees as discrimination against small shop owners within the WEEE legislation.

Once upon a time, handling signals in Perl code had a pretty big gotcha — one that you couldn’t work around. Perl 5.8 changed signal handling in a way that eliminated that gotcha, but replaced it with a different one, harder to trigger, but no less surprising.

Not content with knowing what you're doing online, Google has patented a process using the accelerometer in your phone to work out what you're doing offline too, all in the interest of improving your experience.

Are you one of the IT shops with Itanium-based servers at the heart of your data center expecting a substantial speed boost this year from Intel with the quad-core "Tukwila" Itaniums? You'd better forget about it, because the processor won't be making an appearance until the first quarter of 2010.

Anonymized data collected from GPS-enabled devices may not be as anonymous as you think, according to researchers who show that knowing someone's general home and work locations can be enough to identify an individual uniquely.

With Power6+ systems in the market and Power7 machinery slated for next year - and with IBM's supply chain expert (Bob Moffatt) in charge of its Systems and Technology Group - you can't expect older gear to stay in the product line for very long.